Perry Quick, economic adviser

WASHINGTON — Perry Day Quick, 61, a senior staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers during the Carter and Reagan administrations, died at his home of colorectal cancer on Tuesday.

Mr. Quick also worked as a senior economist for the Federal Reserve Board and helped shape Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart's economic policy for his campaign. He served on the Democratic Leadership Council.

Asked how he could serve such different administrations as those of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, Mr. Quick said Democrats and Republicans generally treated sound economic advice the same way: by ignoring it.

He was a doctoral student in economics at Stanford University in 1973 when he took a leave to serve as the first economist in the Federal Energy Administration's Office of Energy Conservation. His analysis helped policy makers separate the energy consumption impact of government programs from the effects of the threefold rise in oil prices.

Two years later, he became a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Board, where his analysis supported major monetary policy actions through the last half of the 1970s. He also acted as a speechwriter for Fed chairmen Arthur Burns, G. William Miller and Paul Volcker.

His six months of work with Hart began in 1981 when the Colorado Democrat outlined his philosophy over breakfast in the Russell Senate Office Building, in a two-page memo written in block letters.

"He was setting up the neo-liberal program right there," Mr. Quick once said. "Under new approaches, he listed the consumption tax -- a tax imposed only on the income people spent, designed to encourage savings -- and a tax on industries that allowed prices or wages to exceed an established maximum, I guess because those were the things he knew about at the time. And he said to me, `Do for the economy what we've already done for the military. Take all this, put some economic theory behind it and give me a plan that is workable.'"

He moved on to the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies, where he worked until 1985, when he established the economic consulting firm Quick, Finan and Associates. Five years later, it was bought out by Ernst & Young, and Mr. Quick became a partner. He built the firm's Economic Consulting and Quantitative Analysis Group to more than 200 economists, econometricians, statisticians and financial analysts.

Mr. Quick joined CRA International in 2002 as a vice president and served as an expert witness in court cases.

He was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Cornell University and received a master's degree in business in 1972 and a doctoral degree in economics in 1980, both from Stanford.